Science: A Modern Leonardo

Professor Patrick Geddes, head of the department of civics and sociology at the University of Bombay, India, is in America on a four months’ visit, giving a course of lectures at the New School of Social Research and elsewhere.

Patrick Geddes (no relation to Eric and Auckland) is one of the most versatile geniuses of modern times and is distinguished in several lines of scientific and social endeavor. He is 69 years old and first became famous as a biologist and authority on sex. He is the co-author of Sex and of Evolution (in the Home University Library) and of The Evolution of Sex with Professor J. Arthur Thomson, editor of the great four-volume Outline of Science.

About half of Geddes’ active life has been spent at Aberdeen and Edinburgh. At Edinburgh he founded a famous summer school of civics, built the ” Outlook Tower,” a laboratory in practical sociology, instituted a social survey of Edinburgh years before the first American survey, collected one of the most complete zoological gardens in the world, and laid the foundation for the city-planning movement which culminated in the London conference of 1910 and the Ghent exposition of 1913.

The last decade Professor Geddes has spent in India and Palestine. He surveyed 50 different cities of India, from Bombay to Calcutta and from Amritsar to Madura, producing comprehensive reports and plans for every department of urban life from sewage and traffic regulation to education. He is an able architect and engineer and has drawn plans for Tagore’s new schools in Bengal, for a zoo at Lucknow and a university at Hyderabad. At Bombay he has collected a city-planning exhibition occupying a hall 200 feet long. In Palestine he cooperated with the Zionists in survey work, including plans for a Hebrew university on Mt. Scopas. Geddes was a friend and colleague of Elisée Reclus, the great French geographer, and originated with him the idea of ” regional surveys” to consider man in relation to his geographic environment. He is co-editor with Victor V. Branford of the “Making of the Future ” series on social problems.

The significant thing about Geddes is that he synthesizes his vast knowledge from these various fields in a movement to adapt industry, agriculture, architecture, domestic economy and institutions in general to the needs and self-expression of all human beings.